02. Prayer

Have you ever known the kind of person who you want to take all your prayer requests to because it somehow seems that when they pray, heaven listens? Like their prayers seem to always get answered. The good news is that those kinds of people—the ones who you may esteem as having some special connection with heaven—are just regular followers of Jesus. There is nothing available to them that isn’t also available to you.

Prayer draws us into an ongoing, close communion with Him…which by itself can be life changing! Of all of the disciplines, prayer is the most central for this reason.

Key Insights

1. We have the ability to provoke change! The Apostle Paul wrote that we are co-laborers together with God. That means we work together with Him in a way that things in our lives and in the earth can be changed. While the common adage, “It must be the will of God” just because it happened sounds spiritual…it’s actually not biblical. There are many things that happen that are not what God wanted…beginning with the fall in the garden and continuing all the way to this very day every time someone dies without salvation. We know it’s His will that all men be saved (1 Tim 2:3-4), and we also know that people die every day having rejected Christ. God chose to partner together with us in accomplishing His will in the earth. Of course He can override anything He wants to, but generally speaking, we are in the earth as His representatives, and our prayers can help His will come forth in the earth. This should underscore for us the importance of our praying! It is one of our responsibilities in our partnership with Him. What you pray matters. It can make a real difference in someone’s life.
   

2. You can learn to pray. Whether you are new to praying at all, or even if you are a seasoned pray-er with many years of experience, there is always room to grow in our prayer life in authority and spiritual success (seeing our prayers actually be answered more and more). The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. We can determine to pray so that our experience conforms to the words of Jesus rather than trying to make his words conform to our experience.

How to Pray

1. Know God’s will. Jesus nor the Apostles ever concluded a prayer with, “If it be thy will.”

2. Get in contact with God so His life and power can flow through you.

3. Be quiet…and listen. We oftentimes think prayer is just when we bring our requests or praise to God. But as significant a part of praying is the time that we set ourselves before Him to listen and hear how He’s leading us in what and how to pray for something. Listening is the prelude to intercession.

4. Have faith… The Bible tells us that great miracles are possible through faith the size of a mustard seed!

5. …and compassion. Compassion was a tangible element of every healing in the New Testament. If we genuinely love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give, and that can cause us to pray with faith.

6. Don’t wait until you feel like it to pray. It’s a practice that can and should be practiced regularly. The more you pray, the more you will desire to pray! Sometimes it feels like there’s this threshold that you can cross over. Where to begin with, you’re sort of doing it just because you know you should or because you need to or it’s the thing to do. But after a little while, there comes a time when you love it so much you don’t even want to leave! Where you’ll be so deep into your praying that you’ll have to pull yourself away to tend to your other duties.

Who to Pray For

Marriages. Your Pastors (they know and can feel if the church is praying for them or not!). Your children (y’all know there’s nothing like the power of a praying mama! We could share testimonies all night long of kids who were kept safe and kept in the palm of the Lord’s Hand because they had a praying mama, dad, or grandma!) Pray against evil.

Examples from the Bible & History

Keep in mind when you read examples of people from the Bible and from history that we should be encouraged by these examples rather than discouraged. Remember that God meets you where you are and walks with you into something deeper, step by step. So if your prayer life doesn’t look anything like this, don’t beat yourself up! Rather, be inspired by an invitation into something deeper with the Lord.

• Jesus. He oftentimes awoke before the dawn to retreat to a lonely place to pray (Mark 1:35).

• David. He also sacrificed sleep in order to pray. (Ps 63:1)

• The Apostles. Resisted the temptation to invest their energies in other important tasks by determining to continually give themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word. (Acts 6:4)

• Martin Luther. “I have so much business I cannot get on without three hours daily in prayer.”

For these, prayer was not just a habit to tack on to their lives…it was their life.